Architecture chinoise | EPFL Graph Search

L’architecture chinoise, est depuis les années 1980, une architecture en pleine mutation. Une nouvelle génération d’architectes chinois prend la relève des premiers architectes formés en Occident au et l’aspect architectural et urbain de la Chine se métamorphose à vive allure, aux dépens des dernières traces de l’architecture traditionnelle (d'époques Ming et Qing essentiellement) encore visibles, et aux dépens de l’architecture des minorités : l’architecture au Tibet, celle des oasis du Xinjiang, les yourtes des éleveurs encore en usage en Mongolie Intérieure et au nord du Xinjiang, parmi tant d’autres. Depuis les origines, l’architecture en Chine, dans les zones de peuplement Han, était majoritairement une architecture de bois, les murs de brique n’étant pas porteurs. La composition-type de l'espace reposait sur l'emploi de cours successives et de bâtiments structurés en multiples du siheyuan. C’est sous cet aspect que se présentaient globalement les villes comme les campagnes c

La création d'une japonité moderne (1870-1940), ou Le regard des architectes européens sur le Japon

Irène Elizabeth Vogel Chevroulet

This thesis questions the fundamentals and modes characterising the European architects' way of looking at Japanese architecture and garden art between 1870 and 1940. It establishes the corpus of the major writings and of other texts published by their Occidental and Japanese contemporaries in English, French and German. We analyse the writings' major issues, outstanding specifics and realisations. We detect and describe the creation of a modern Japan-ness through the writings of four major protagonists. Firstly, Josiah Conder was professor of Architectural History and Theory at Tokyo Imperial College and later considered as the "father of modern architecture" in Japan. We discuss his articles and books, published between 1877 and 1893, as being inaugural as well as forerunners of Japan-ness. Between 1903 and 1910, the architect Chûta Itô and the art historian Kakuzô Okakura gave its premises in their publications. The engineer Franz Baltzer as well as the architects Ralph A. Cram and Frank Lloyd Wright confirmed some of these ideas in their books published between 1903 and 1912. Secondly, we study writings from an architect who never traveled to Japan : Robert Mallet-Stevens. His articles, written in France from 1911 et 1913, were an indirect reference to Conder's articles. Thirdly, we analyse the theoretical and innovative works published by Bruno Taut between 1924 and 1937. We look at the way in which he valued and consolidated an intercultural Japan-ness. We question the existence of a Japan-ness in garden arts' writings. We establish how his contemporaries spread Japan-ness specificities : the architects Wajiro Kon, Kôji Fujii, Tetsuro Yoshida, Sutemi Horiguchi, Wells Coates, Richard Neutra and Antonin Raymond, the art historian Jirô Harada, the landscape designers – Tsuyoshi Tamura, Percy. S. Cane et Christopher Tunnard –, and the writer Jun'ichiro Tanizaki. We identify which specificities had already been defined by Itô, Kon and Horiguchi before Taut validation. Fourthly, Charlotte Perriand confirmed this established modern Japan-ness as a source of inspiration with her notes taken during her stay in Japan between 1940 and 1941. The thesis chronicles the impact of her notes onto some of her realisations in Japan and later in France. Thanks to this comparative analysis of texts, the thesis argues that the European gaze towards Japan is reflecting its preoccupations towards justifications for its own architectural development. This gaze is also orientated by the interests of the Japanese themselves. These are looking for an international recognition of their traditional architecture. We describe then how Japan-ness is created through writings and how it works as an appropriation of modernity enabling Japanese architecture to step in an avant-garde role. This creation follows two stages. The first one is a process of distinction from Asian architecture by identification and reinforcement of Japanese specifics. At its core lies the discourse upon the differences of the Japanese shintoist and zen soul. The second one is a process of sorting out common specificities with Western avant-garde ones. This time, the discourse concerns abstract similarities. The whole set of Japan-ness specificities defines an intercultural architecture which distinguishes itself both from Japonisme and from Occidentalisme. Lastly, the results show the profits gained by this European gaze and taken into account in their own architecture.

EPFL2009

Counterpoint: The Musical Analogy, Periodicity, and Rural Urban Dynamics

Matthew Skjonsberg

Every thesis calls for its antithesis, and every revolution prompts a counterrevolution—this takes place within the same generation as well as across intergenerational oscillations (Gassett 1958, Sennett 1974). Enlightenment thinkers were critical of the Humanist tradition of analogical thinking—their own encyclopedic enthusiasm was intent upon creating a lexicon of the world, an ambition that has been assiduously realized in contemporary Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and empirical attitudes toward industrial agriculture and managerial urbanization. However, languages are comprised of two parts—a lexicon and grammar—and analogical thinking, focused as it is on seeing relationships between parts, is particularly well suited to provide conceptual frameworks for contextual design. To harness the power of polemics, we can anticipate that at least two conceptual paradigms, polarities to one another, are needed at any given moment—and that these are best conceived of as, to paraphrase Sébastien Marot, “opposite, but not exclusive of one another” (Marot 2003). Further, as any given analogy will inevitably prompt justifiable reactions against it, I propose that we work between those two oldest and most enduring architectural analogies: the biological analogy (on growth and form) and the musical analogy (on composition and form). Of these, the biological analogy is clearly in ascendancy—see, for example, Philip Steadman’s seminal The Evolution of Designs: The Biological Analogy in Architecture and the Applied Arts (Steadman 1979, 2008) or Lynn Margulis’ The Basic Unit of Life (Margulis 2010). Hence, this sustained reflection on the musical analogy, made with a view to its instrumentality for composing rural urban dynamics in relation to existing landscapes.

Taylor & Francis / CRC Press2014

La création d'une japonité moderne (1870-1940), ou Le regard des architectes européens sur le Japon

Irène Elizabeth Vogel Chevroulet

EPFL2009